essentially a last-minute decision selecting sarah palin. why such a lag between clinching the nomination in march and determining the nominee late in the summer? >> well, steve, that's an excellent question. it does go to the heart of the selection of sarah palin. senator mccain had been around presidential politics. he enjoyed, i think, kind of the opportunity as the de facto nominee to go through the rituals they get to go there, that is hiring someone or retaining someone, a respected lawyer, to go through the process of vetting the background of potential candidates. given it was a mccain operation, which tended to have relatively loose lips and a fair amount of leaking, this process was kept relatively confidential in realtime. they day we decided to come up with "game change" initially was the day he went on imus's program and talked about the

vetting program and the lawyer helping him when he wasn't supposed to. that was one of the last times there was a public window into what was going on. they looked into the background in a normal way of a lot of candidates. some were mentioned in the clip you showed at the top. senator lieberman, a close friend of senator mccain's was at the top of senator mccain's wish list for a lot of the process. after they did the kind of standard weeks long background check and considered more surface way any number of others, they left themselves, you could argue inexcusably, they left themselves with no one, they could ark, would be a good pick, no one who could get through as a net plus for them. there was writing in the book serious consideration about senator lieberman, the politics of a running mate eight years before and liberal on most issues was something they really grappled wand in the end they thought was not going to be

politically effective and could be a real political problem. then they turned with just a week to go -- again, as you point out, in effect squandered many months not vetting someone who in the end they wanted to pick, with a week to go they not only reached out to sarah palin but began from a standing part and not the normal due diligence you would do in such a case to look at sarah palin's background and decide in senator mccain's case to pick her, even though, as he knew, there were a lot of risks involved. >> come authors of "game change" 2008 books, looking at the race afterlife time. inside the book convinced he would be the nominee, barack obama wanted to start dealing with the issues he was destined to confront in the general election which race was one. reverend wright sped up the timetable for the speech. >> i've already condemned in unequivocal terms the statements

of reverend wright that have caused such controversy, and in some cases pain. for some nagging questions remain. did i know him to be an occasionally fierce critics of american domestic and foreign policy? of course. did i ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while i sat in the church? yes. did i strongly disagree with many of his political views? absolutely. just as i'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree. but the remarks that caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial, they weren't simply a religious leader's efforts to speak out against perceived injustice, instead they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country. a view that sees white racism as endemic, that elevates what is

wrong with america above all that we know is right with america. a view that sees the conflibts in the middle east as rooted primary in the actions of stalwart allies like israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical islam. as such, reverend wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity, racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems. >> that was another defining moment in the democratic race. as you indicate indeed book, this was a speech barack obama had wanted to give for a very long time. >> it was. i mean, he was really -- as he got closer and closer to being the party's nominee and felt like he was on track to get that, he knew that the question of his race, being the first

african-american in the party's history. he wanted to give a speech. he's a high-minded guy. he had been grappling with race and identity. he felt it was a teachable moment. the question was when it would come. reverend wright sz explosion onto the political scene was a peril. he felt in the obama campaign because of the delegate math he was destined to be the democratic nominee but hillary clinton was staging big comebacks. she was winning the ohio primary. she was winning the texas primary. there were a lot of states in the future that hillary clinton was going to be very strong in. and there were still a lot of superdelegates that hadn't decided what to do. there was a chance if there was some controversy that erupted that disqualified obama as a democratic nominee, that was the only thing that could knock him off from ultimately getting the big prize. reverend wright was that kind of thing. when he and on the scene saying the incendiary things he said, obama immediately moved and said, look, i've wanted to give this speech for a while. this is a time to do it.

he gave that speech you played the clip from, was roundly applauded for it across the political spectrum. then, of course, reverend wright came back on the scene shortly thereafter and said other disquieting things and that's when obama did something he didn't want to do in the initial race speech, really sever ties with reverend wright, throw him under the bus. he didn't want to do it because of his relationship personal, he felt he had to do it. there was a moment before the press conference where he goes out and does that, cuts reverend wright loose where he's standing there alone looking into the mirror. eventually robert gibbs, his press secretary comes in, is this how america sees me. they think i'm like reverend wright? they think i'm an angry black man. he understood not only he felt that was the wrong perception but what a politically dangerous perception that would be. he knew, even though it was painful personally he had to

sever ties completely with reverend wright so he could get past this and be a viable nominee and candidate in the fall. >> let me pick up from that mark halperin, personalities differ in two-for-one to what we saw in 2008. one of the similarities we don't know when this republican primary will end, people referring to the length of the primary in 2008 and said, in essence, it didn't really hurt barack obama. can you touch on that point? >> well, as we write in the book, and as the country saw there was an epic nature of the battle and big personalities that made it exciting. >> i think what is clear both candidates handled it well. particularly barack obama used individual election nights and elongated process in a mechanical way to build an organization in individual states and around the country to become better as a candidate and

to hone a message. if you look at the reception hillary clinton got, in the end she was elevated as well. she was one of the most respected women in the country because of the toughness and skill she showed in that campaign. in this presidential election what is potentially an elongated republican process you don't find all those dynamics, at least not yet. i don't think you've seen much improvement in the candidates. in some ways they have gotten worse and left a trail of errors. i don't think they have been nearly as effective, including mitt romney, in laying groundwork in terms of message, in terms of message as barack obama and even hillary clinton was four years ago. and the final thing i'll say, these candidates in the race now, they are -- created factions within the party. you don't find romney supporters who are really enthusiastic

about rick santorum. in some cases you don't find a lot of romney supporters enthusiastic about requirement but that's a separate issue. in the case of hillary clinton and barack obama, although it was contentious and passions were high among supporters and themselves, once it became clear barack obama was going to be the nominee, people got on board and the party was united and energized. i don't see that dynamic yet in the republican party. that could change. for the most part the bitterness that exists between the candidates extends to a lot of their supporters and leaves them potentially in a much less strong position than barack obama was when he emerged from very elongated battle. >> if we could for a moment let's take you and viewers back to spring of 2008 may and june. you write in the book the perception that she, hillary clinton, had behaved badly, had taken hold in the media and threatened to eclipse everything she accomplished, she had to get behind obama quickly and graciously but to do it in a way that served her interest and her image. >> as we gather here today in

this historic, magnificent building, the 50th woman to leave this earth is orbiting overhead. if we could blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the white house. and although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it. and the light is shining through like never before filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. >> john heilemann, that was a

quote that obviously hillary clinton made famous but something sarah palin also used in her 2008 acceptance speech. >> yeah, it was a very powerful image. hillary clinton at that moment after she decided to stop, after the final primaries, she had to make a decision. there were people around her who really wanted her to fight on to denver. she had senior advisers like mark penn who didn't want her to actually drop out of the race, who felt like you could actually conceivably, something would happen to obama over the summer, in terms of negative information that might come out about him, she might maintain her ability as a nominee. there was factions in her world, as you read in the book she ultimately made the decision she needed for her sake, the party's sake, everybody's sake she needed to not pursue that path. she needed to give a speech that would be a gracious endorsement of barack obama but also one that would serve her interest, one that would make clear she had run a historic campaign, one

that would touch on -- there was so much -- she had run so much as the strong commander in chief, not as the woman -- historic candidate of women. she had not hit on those themes until very late in the campaign. once she found her way to that she had become a real hero for a lot of democratic women. she wanted to hit that theme in a very strong way. the glass ceiling line lives on. it lived on as you say to the point where sarah palin adopted it later. it lives on to this day. i think she began the process by which when mark talked about barack obama and hillary clinton were the fact it was not inevitable that would be the case for hillary clinton. if she had lapsed to bitterness, decided to fit on to denver, stinting in her support of obama, it could have diminished her. instead she made a wise, and as i said before, gracious choice. wise tactically, strategically, wise in terms of her own future decision to really get behind barack obama and do whatever it

was he asked and be as supportive as possible. that was the beginning of her seedsing the mantle of self-enlargement in some ways. she ended up being a bigger figure than when she started and she was pretty big when it started. it was the result of very important fundamental decisions she had to make. she made them in retrospect, you can't do anything but applaud them not just in the abstract but they served her interests in the bess possible way. >> let's turn back to the republican race and john mccain. the answer to this might be pretty obvious. as john mccain was searching for a running mate, finally selecting sarah palin late in the process, my question to you is how much of that was a political decision and how much of it was a decision that john mccain truly felt that sarah palin was qualified to be vice president? >> well, that's a great question, steve. i'm not sure we were able to get to the bottom of that sufficiently to answer that in the spirit in which you intended.

it's clear they had a lot of political problems they needed to address. given that john mccain was being tied to george bush whose record at that point was unpopular with a large number of independent and centrist voters in the election they needed a game changing pick. in a perfect world he would have found someone unambiguously able to be president. most he considered seriously, all men, i think would have been seen as instantly qualified to be president. sarah palin had a higher bar. she was unknown. she did not have the national experience, as john said before. she hadn't even been governor of a lightly populated state for all that long. i think it's pretty clear senator mccain tthe political c. i also think it's clear had sarah palin been given more time to prepare, had the campaign been given more time to prepare, outside of a handful of staffers, those in charge of figuring out how to launch the

presidential pick, had they been given more time for those things and framed sarah palin as a maverick, someone who stood up to special interest, someone who understood the real lives of real people based on her financial situation and family situation, i think she would have been potentially not just a strong political pick but a strong pick in terms of projecting the image of the ticket for governance. but she did have, as we show in the book and as the movie shows on hbo, she did have some real challenges that were exacerbated by the fact she wasn't afforded sufficient time to prepare. >> john heilemann on that point, lessons for nominee selecting a running mate. you go back to dan quayle, thrust onto the national stage, been in the house and senate but not a prominent figure when george herbert walker bush selected him and also what we sara palin. >> i think, steve, the overarching of all vice

presidential selections is something he alluded to, the best political pick is the best substantive pick. i think that for this reason, most american voters don't make a decision based on the who is on the ticket. vice presidential nominees move through votes and only on the margins. most voters the way they look at the vice presidential pick is the first decision the nominee decision as a reflection of the decisionmaker and how serious and scrupulous that nominee is being. so what they want to know, first and foremost, has the nominee chosen someone who is unequivocally qualified to be president. if you meet that bar, you've basically done everything you can do for yourself in a vice presidential pick. you think about someone like joe biden. the choice was whatever you conditioning about joe biden, disagree or agree with him, very few people can the country who look at him and say this man is

qualified to be president. same with dick cheney, in 2000, immediately answered the fundamental question. it said something important about both those presidential nominees, barack obama and george bush, they were taking this seriously. they wanted to have someone who could obviously succeed them if something happened to them in office. i think that's a huge, important thing voters look to as a question of their judgment. so i think that is the lesson going forward. if you satisfy that, you do yourself a world of good politically. i also think that the best way to do that is to have the kind of process that barack obama and george w. bush and other successful presidential nominees in this regard have had, which is a serious, rigorous, well executed vetting process, not something that's done on the fly, not something where there are surprises on the other end. you conduct this thing like a military operation. you try to answer every question in advance. you get serious people on it. give them enough time to do it properly so nothing that comes up later turns out to be a jack in the box surprise either on the political level or

substantive level. those are the two key things. vet these guys and pick someone obviously in the minds of everyone qualified for the job from day one. >> let me follow up on two moments from the book and one we captured from the c-span archives as sarah palin accepted the republican nomination in st. paul, minnesota, in 2008. >> i love those hockey moms. they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull, lipstick. [ applause ] >> so i signed up for pta i wanted to make my kids' public education even better. when i ran for city council, i didn't need focus groups and voter profiles because i knew those voters and i knew their families, too.

before i became governor of the great state of alaska, i was mayor of my hometown. and since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. [ applause ] i guess a smalltown mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities. >> mark halperin, that moment captured in the book and the hbo movie. what was happening behind the scenes in team mccain?

>> well, a lot. you know, the 60-day period from the time she was chosen through the election day was pretty packed. part of what attracted us to that story for the book and attracted hbo to of the book fos a compact narrative of 60 days in which so much happened. sarah palin, as her supporters point out, and as factually true, she performed extraordinarily well at the three biggest moments a vice presidential nom he has to perform. the day she was announced as the pick and then in the debate where she held her own for the most part against one of the most experienced politicians in our national government, joe biden. she at that moment, she was giving the speech there was a lot going on. her family was having to be integrated into a national campaign. they were all getting sort of new clothes and new briefings and understanding of dealing with the secret service. she was being briefed on how to get ready to do a round of national media interviews and in some ways to start preparing for the debate.

and the mccain campaign was starting to realize that while they made some assumptions about what her level of knowledge would be to deal with national, international affairs, that there was going to be a lot of work that had to be done to get her up to speed n get her through the debate and through those initial interviews with charlie gibson and kate eye cie couric. john heilemann, your thoughts? >> i was thinking more when you asked the first questions. i was thinking more about the more granular way, they put her out there on that speech up in st. paul on the convention stage in st. paul to give that speech. and though she had done well as mark said in her intrintroducti speech, this was a national audience of many tens of millions. and the pressure was extraordinary. and john mccain was watching backstage with a fair amount of nervousness. not because he didn't trust sarah palin, but because she had never given a speech. very few have with that kind of

focus on her. as you will see in the film when people see the movie, he's watch with mounting excitement as she gives this speech. he can't believe how good she is and what a red light performer she's turned out to be. as he gets more and more excited, she finishes the speech and mccain is over the moon. and someone informs him, one of his advisers says, you know, i got to tell you, senator mccain, the most amazing thing about that is partway through the speech her teleprompter was malfunctioning and the prompter was moving too slowly and mccain looks at her and said, i hope that doesn't happen to me. i'll be screwed if that happens to me. it was -- she not only performed under those circumstances but performed -- had another handicap imposed on her by the technology. so you can't really imagine the degree of pressure she was under or how much the campaign was on tender hooks as they watched her out there. and she hit it out of the park. their expectation coming out of that speech was that she was an unalloyed aset eed aset to the.

and she was. on the democratic side there was a lot of concern as the mccain/palin ticket came out of that convention ahead of barack obama in the national polls by as much as five or six points. people on the democratic side were sort of freaking bought the way she'd injected so much energy and fresh sbons that campaign. it wasn't really until some of her later stumbles and then the outbreak, the real collapse of the financial -- when the collapse of the financial crisis really kicked inagain. and the pick began to have some problems and complications that were hard for the camp -- the mccain campaign to deal with and the campaign gave obama the opportunity to rise to the occasion and dealing with the financial crisis in a way that made a lot of voters peel confident about his ability and temperament to deal with what was ahead. >> as you both know, during the debate preparation process, more potential stumbles for sarah pa palin as they tried to prepare her for the debate with joe

biden you. write that sarah palin continued to stumble over an unavoid abab element, her rival's name. senator o'biden. three staffers suggested why don't you just call him joe? >> can i call you joe? thank you. thank you, gen. thank you. thank you. >> so mark halperin, take us back to your moment. >> it is a charming moment. it's one of the rare moments where sarah palin seemed a little bit nervous walking out on that stage. as she said in the debate, she did pretty well and found her voice. she did refer to him as o'ed bi

in debate prep and they were worried that would be branded as a gaffe and inability to think on her feet coming off the katie couric interview she did. a series of interviews with katie couric that hadn't gone well and had exposed for some viewers and voters, weaknesses in governor palin's ability to think on her feet and be knowledgeable about things. for most candidates it would be seen as a funny gaffe. they were worried it would take on larger symbolic meaning if she said it in the debate. call him joe. she said i don't know. how can i call him joe? so she decided to ask him for permission to do that. the irony is in the debate while she did sometimes call him joe, she did reforehim as o'biden. it didn't really get any attention at the time even though she made the very gaffe she'd been so concerned. >> you are laughing john heilemann. what's so funny? >> well, i just think -- it's just kind of a funny story. you aren't really sure whether

the reason -- they were never sure whether she was conflating barack obama's name and turning it to into o'biden or because he's irish or irish american she was turning it -- because of the irish association. i just think that it's funny that for all of the concern they had over it that she made that mistake and literally nobody noticed. you can go back and watch the tape of the debate and you'll hear her do that. i don't think there was any press coverage of it whatsoever. it'snn campaigns wse for the reasons that mark said. but in the end, because she gave such a strong performance in -- were flaws in that performance per sure and ways you can poke holes into it. by and large she kind of fought joe biden who was a solid debater. she fought him to a draw. in that context, given the concerns they had about her and some of the difficulties with her in debate prep, that was a huge win for her. because it went over so well and because she was broadly seen as

having held her own against joe biden, the small error that they had been so concerned about was completely overlooked. the media dynamics are sometimes unpredictable as you know. >> let me follow up on something that mark halperin talked about earlier. it was a best-selling book now turned into a movie. but in terms of writing this book and the style in which you present to the readers, what were you thinking? >> well, we were thinking very much, it's funny when mark talked about the genesis of the book, the initial idea being let's try to make this as a movie. we both said, neither one of us has written a screen play. that's probably not a good idea. but there was no question as we wrote the book we wanted the book to have a cinematic feel to it or novelistic feel to it. there's not a lot of back story in the book. we felt like because these candidates were so well known, we didn't have to take readers back to the arkansas governor's mansion in the case of the clintons or beaches of waikiki or hanoi hilt none the case of john mccain. we wanted to tell the story in

the moment as the -- as the candidates and the candidates' spouses experienced it and try to tell an interior story about what they were going through as human beings in this extraordinary kind of flash incinerator meat grinder process that running for president is. and we wanted to have the pace of the book move from big scene to big scene. not with a lot of, you know, exposition and not with a lot of history. that was a very conscious choice we made. we wanted it to read like a screenplay in some sense and have big set pieces. have a lot of dialogue. we spent an extraordinary amount of time doing the research for the book and the reporting on the book trying to go back and re-create dialogue or at least be able to paraphrase dialogue as best we could because we wanted it to be a human scale story. and one of the things mark said before we had executed on what we thought. for better or for worse, we ended up with a book that read to us very much like we imagined on that first day. >> you want to duplicate the success that "game change" gave

readers and you in 2008. but are there lessons you take away from this book that you may apply to your reporting in this current race of 2012? >> well, just to do the things we did before to focus on the humanity of the story. we said when we were talking to publishers and then to hbo about the option of the book and the rights to the book. don't think of this as a political story. think of this as a human story about couples and families and individuals putting themselves out in incredibly competitive environment with a lot of scrutiny. and a lot of -- a lot of hard-fought competition and pressure trying to achieve the same goal. and there can only be one winner. and that was our focus, and that will be our focus again to tell the story from a human point of view. not so much about polling or punditry or the process of accumulation of delegates but rather the important question of what it's like on a hum